The director of TETSUO: THE IRON MAN veers away from cyberpunk to a period piece with its own brand of quirks in GEMINI, on Blu-ray from Mondo Macabro.

Having survived the war without injury and been awarded a medal, village doctor Yukio Daitokuji (Masahiro Motoki, THE BIRD PEOPLE IN CHINA) has the respect of the local gentry but he cannot hide his contempt for the people of the slums. At first, his feeling seem motivated by his wife Rin (Ryô, ENTER THE VOID) who suffers from amnesia and has no memory of her family or the fire that consumed their home and left a strange burn scar on her leg. When one night he must choose between treating a plague victim with a baby or the mayor who injured himself when falling down drunk, he shocks his wife by revealing that he considers the people of the slums as less than human and responsible for all of society's ills. When Yukio's father (writer Yasutaka Tsutsui) suddenly dies, and his mother (Shiho Fujimura, TOKYO GODFATHER) follows soon after, Yukio begins to sense something wrong in the house and is soon himself attacked and thrown down the garden well. He wakes to discover that his captor is his own double who reveals himself to be slum thief Sutekichi who takes over Yukio's life including his place in bed beside Rin. Returning periodically to rain down food that Yukio refuses to eat off the rat-strewn well floor, Sutekichi maddens Yukio by telling him that his wife is not an amnesiac but a beggar woman of the slums and threatening Yukio's reputation among his respected clients, awakening in Yukio his own repressed violence as he becomes the thing he hates.

A thorough visual departure from director Shinya Tsukamoto's TETSUO films which were shot in grainy black-and-white with live action and stop motion animation, GEMINI at first looks very stately in its realization of the period setting – the film was also photographed and edited by Tsukamoto – more Peter Greenaway than Ozu; that is, until the more fantastical elements enter the film and Tsukamoto rockets along with a handheld camera sometimes following the frenetic pace of the characters and sometimes offering counterpoint tension to their stillness. Adapted from a novel by Edogawa Rampo – whose fantastic, horrific, and erotic stories have inspired films like THE WATCHER IN THE ATTIC, THE BLIND BEAST, and BLACK LIZARD as well as the surreal biopic THE MYSTERY OF RAMPO – GEMINI's split between apparent good and evil between the protagonist is not particularly novel, but the emerging bestial violence in the good character seems to sap that of his double as Sutekichi attempts to become Yukio. The relationship between Yukio/Sutekichi and Rin provides another duality that reveals different vulnerabilities of both men even at their most angry and violent. The POV shifts between the three characters divide the narrative, and while not all three survive the finale, one feels as if all three come to know each other and themselves better than before. GEMINI marks a shift in Tsukamoto's career from the likes of HIROKU THE GOBLIN and TOKYO FIST towards more artier but no less obsessive fare like VITAL, the erotic A SNAKE OF JUNE, and FIRES ON THE PLAIN with more refined genre departures like the two NIGHTMARE DETECTIVE films.

When Arrow Video announced their four-disc ten film set SOLID METAL NIGHTMARES: THE FILMS OF SHINYA TSUKAMOTO, GEMINI was notable in its absence; however, the film was announced by Mondo Macabro as one of their red case limited editions followed by this standard edition (Third Window Films has announced the film for Blu-ray release in the U.K. but no street date has been confirmed). The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer comes from an existing HD master that is not always so sharp and is lacking contrast in some of the daytime exteriors – possibly an intentional visual choice – but the grading also looks refreshingly like that of a nineties film rather than the teal and orange revisionist choices seen in some contemporary masters. The grading is sometimes aggressive with the slum scenes and some interior scenes sporting warmer skintones and much paler ones in the moonlit night scenes. The film was an early non-5.1 Dolby Digital title, and the Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo track is very aggressively front-oriented in terms of dialogue and scoring while the surrounds do have some subtle effects (the slum scenes and some rain scenes are enveloping but the film otherwise uses silence for tension). Optional English subtitles are provided.